


Cutting it Fine

by PuzzleRaven



Series: Strange Pursuits [1]
Category: Fallout 4, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: AU, Don't copy to another site, Extreme AU, Fallout, Gen, Not to be archived elsewhere, Not to be reposted elsewhere, Synth, do not copy to another site, holographic doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:07:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23410696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PuzzleRaven/pseuds/PuzzleRaven
Summary: One civilisation's 'obsolete junk' is another's lucrative treasure, but when crime involves high technology, the line between theft and kidnapping can be very fine one.(Part of an ongoing series - posted here to keep things going until I can get access to the journal again. Quarantine issues...)
Series: Strange Pursuits [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1684024
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Cutting it Fine

**Cutting it Fine**

The slicer ran through the pristine corridors of one of the utopia's darker secrets, no time to waste. Neatly side-stepping through the frozen people as he would a desk or a chair, he checked the map on his Pip-Boy without stopping, seeing the watch hand beside it slowly turning backwards. Three levels to go to the mines, two to his target, and the fastest route was straight through the cafeteria. A waitress in the doorway meant the door was already open, saving him time. Ducking his head under the tray of drinks she was carrying, he stepped passed the woman without slowing, and made his way through the busy room by jumping table to table dodging heads as he went. He was on the clock, no spare seconds.

The exit door was open but inconveniently blocked, as two inconsiderately frozen people stood in the middle of it. Holding their single-use coffee cups, laughing, one of them with an arm raised invitingly over the other's head, like there was nothing hideously wrong providing the underpinning to all their comfortable lives. Even with the skintight uniforms they all wore, replicated fresh each morning, there wasn't space to duck around them. Climbing over wasn't possible so he didn't waste time trying, stepping behind the bar and squeezing round the frozen bartender to hide himself from the cameras. Make sure the bartender would be turning away, squeezing into the tiny gap behind the server and under the bar to keep himself out of sight, he reset the slice.

With a sudden burst of sound, time advanced half a second and froze the instant the bartender's foot came down. The slicer climbed out, hidden between the moments again, and pulled himself over the bar using the temporally frozen glasses as steps. The door was still open, but the crewman had dropped his arm round the other's shoulders leaving just enough space for him to climb over them. It wasn't comfortable, but he was used to it. If he spent time in a social area again, there was always a risk someone would interrupt him before he could freeze it. Then the time he'd already spent would be wasted.

Putting his hand on the shorter crewman's shoulder, he pushed himself up, using a frozen, mug-holding, hand as a step and launched himself through the narrow gap over and between their heads. Falling head first, he hit the ground with a roll and was up and running, passing a pair of gold shirts by an open conduit, dust sparking off his suit as it was imbued with just enough time to move aside and close in behind him. The drain on his reserves was minimal, but tracked regardless. Every second mattered.

Taking the turbolift was out of the question. Too many interconnected systems for him to just run one in isolation without unfreezing the whole base, and he wasn't doing that. There were better ways. Checking the Pip-Boy again, he took a left at the T-junction, smoothly avoiding the couple in Victorian dress, straight from the holodeck behind them. If they knew what the holodecks looked like with time frozen, all laser edges and micro-transports to fast for the human eyes to follow, they'd never go in there. He envied them, their utter complacent certainty that technology could never hurt them and was there to abuse as they saw fit. They didn't even carry rad counters.

There were a lot of people here for an isolated industrial outpost, but that was why he'd chosen to come now. Mess up, get caught on camera, and they'd assume he was one of the visiting trader's crew. If they even looked, which they'd only do if he really messed up. If he got it right, and he would, no one would ever know he'd spent time here.

Laying a finger on each on the catches holding the cover of the maintenance tube in place, he gave each the fraction of a second it took to open. Pulling the cover off, he slid in, replacing the cover behind him. Reserves were precious, and here they were limited, but he checked his reserves and spent the time again to reverse his spent seconds. There were four clicks as the clips refastened themselves. It used a lot of energy when he couldn't see the target, but it was the only way to make the clips appear untouched when they were on the other side of a solid panel.

Even the inside of the maintenance tube was sparkling and clean, bringing back very bad memories of where he grew up. It was empty, and there was no time to waste climbing. Gripping the ladder's sides, he put his feet outside the rungs, and slid down, padded gloves and boots taking the brunt of the polished metal. What he'd give for the honest grime and steel of his current home, getting brain surgery from a doctor with no bedside manner at all, rather than this neutral sterility.

Hitting the bottom with a grunt he checked the Pip-Boy again, saw which of the four exits on the crossroads led to his target, and crouched. The crawlway. Two hundred metres on hands and knees wasn't so bad, with the pay-off that awaited him if he got this run right. It was just slow, even rushing as fast as he could. As he started to crawl he promised himself a backup Pip-Boy, ideal for this type of work even if it wasn't the technology he'd started out with. Clouds, datapads, all relied on external connections that didn't exist outside their homegrounds, and crapped out completely outside time. Far from being fragged by radiation or EMP or cracked screens, Pipiboys just kept chugging on, rugged, resilient and completely self-contained in all their green-screened glory. As he pulled a sliding plate off the side of his and spliced the wires into the hi-tech controls for the security screen blocking the access panel, he smirked. They also interfaced with anything, given enough brute force. A quick jolt of time opened the screen in a shower of sparks as the rest of the station stayed frozen. As the mesh screen froze again, time stolen back the instant it opened, he crawled onwards through suspended sparks that flared and died as he moved, burning seconds he didn’t want to waste.

Reaching the access panel he unfroze the hatch, pulling the emergency lever release. The crew would detect a malfunction once time started, and would be here in minutes, but he'd be decades gone by then. He stood up, closing the hatch behind him and snatching back the seconds he'd used to open it. His reserve levels were slowly running down, and he'd only be able to get three, not the four he'd hoped for. It was still enough to set him up for life, even if he had other plans for the funds. 

Grey walls, computer banks, and slick display screens, even here in a room no one ever used. The chairs were padded and the floor he ran across carpeted. These spoiled people had made their workplace seem so civilised for what was, in every way, a slave pit. The mines below worked twenty-four seven because sapient lifeforms didn't need a break if they didn't sleep. Just pump more energy in and reprocess them if they started to complain and not one of these so-called super-civilised people saw anything wrong with that.

He was still moving as he thought, taking the first grey box from his suit pocket and plugging it into a port in the base's computer terminal. His Pip-Boy connected to it using the custom socket he'd added, and he hovered a finger over the "Send" button, unfreezing the computer core as he pressed it. As the room came to life, the sound of the explosion behind him cut in, air ruffling his clothes for less than a second before 'Complete' came up and he froze time again.

The computer display had updated, his little virus isolating the holomatrices into individual packages. With professional skill he sliced time around that data, the channel, the room's emitter, and the Pip-Boy, and let time touch the slice, letting the Pip-Boy power the computer circuits and let the program activate as he downloaded it. A man appeared, fading into existence on the floor.

"Please state the nature of the medical- oh."

"Jailbreak," the slicer said succinctly, as the blue-uniformed, balding, man looked at the mining tool in his hand.

"But I'm not in jail."

"Jail, conscripted mining, difference? Not much." Confident the process was working, the slicer pulled out two more cores, prepping them ready. The greater the volume of time unfrozen, the greater the drain on his reserves, and it was exponential. Keep it small and he could get three, he thought, maybe four if he really cut it fine.

"I have been assigned to-"

"-waste your medical skill," the slicer interrupted. The hologram looked down, somewhat hurt.

"My medical databanks have been deleted." Not surprising. Save space, lobotomise slaves, tomayto, tomarto, and assholes are arseholes.

"No big. We'll getcha a new one." Mentioning databanks, his fingers flew across the Pip-Boy's controls, updating the virus. Snatching better maps would help when he spent time here again.

"You can't just acquire the Federation's entire medical knowledge!" The program's indignance was almost amusing, but under it there was an odd overtone of hope.

"No, Doc, but where we're going most of the people have no medic at all." Download complete. He deactivated the program immediately, ignoring the stuttered protest, pulled the storage box and replaced it with the next. Before he kicked off the next slice he isolated the emitter, pulling the time back from it. The transfer process worked, and he wasn't wasting time, not if he wanted to get four. Second download complete, then the third. Damn. If he went for four he'd have no buffer to get out with. Next time, buddy, next time, he told himself, stowing the gear. When time resumed, if his Pip-Boy wasn't connected, his little virus would corrupt the newly empty sectors with junk, hiding his pilfering. They'd put it down to file corruption or overuse, not that that would stop the spoiled utopians working their little slaves to death. These shiny walls were so like the fraghing Institute, and the people were, too.

Partway back to the panel, he paused, changing his mind in mid-stride. A look at the Pip-Boy revealed a second route, through the lift maintenance shafts; as anodyne and pristine as the rest of the base, but he wouldn't be dodging people the whole way. With the dust kept out of the sterile corridors, he'd burn less time to travel them. Yanking the maps off the computer core had been an impulse, but they were a huge advantage over the black-market sketches he'd relied on to get in. Next time, he'd get four.

Ducking down he added a little time to each catch by the panel, releasing the catches and pulled the hatch away. Pulling it back behind him, these clamps clicking automatically back into place, he snatched what little time remained to them and began to crawl. The cameras were covering this route entire, but while time was frozen they were blind. By the time anyone ordered a computer scan of the base, by the time they could even had time to do it, the slicer and his loot would be well away with no disruption to the time line.

Crawling out of the maintenance shaft into the shuttle bay, he ducked immediately to avoid hitting his head on the side of a shuttle coming in for landing. Resetting the hatch was a tight squeeze, and the side of the shuttle was too slick to climb. He breathed in, wriggling down the gap until he could get out by its engines, and climbed over the frozen curls of its ion trails like a jungle gym to get safely out onto the floor and jog to the wide entrance. He paused by the forcefield that covered the entrance and held the air inside the bay and pulled a length of weighted cord from his belt. This was the part he hated.

To complete his escape meant getting outside the Fed base, or the computer would block the energy signature of his transport when he unfroze time to use it and the crew would beam him back in to answer questions. That would blow his mission fast. Getting caught on camera would do the same. There was a blind spot at the base of the exterior wall in front of the cameras just round the corner outside the bay, but it took twenty seconds to get there. Twenty seconds of no gravity and hard vacuum. His field couldn't unfreeze air to breathe if there wasn't any, and he couldn't steal a spacesuit from here without leaving an obvious trace and throwing the timeline off.

With the cord coiled so it would run slickly through his hands, he began to spin the end round his head, letting it out with a cast that sent it sailing out of the door. Unhappy with the throw he let it land in the dirt, reeling it in for a second try. This time as it sailed out and wrapped to the left of the bay door, he snatched the time from it as it hit the exterior wall. Taking several deep breaths to get as much oxygen into his blood as possible, he blew his breath out in a long gasp and jumped forward, closing his eyes and pulling himself hand over hand along the rope. Time was frozen so the cold could not get to him, the vacuum itself was an insulator, but his lungs burned for air as he reached the end, not bothering to slide time into the rope when he could just unfreeze the whole base and give it a hard tug that brought it straight to him. The emergency teleport linked to his Pip-Boy's lifesigns suddenly received a signal again, and he was deposited on the floor of his puddlejumper gasping for air, the cord tangled on top of him.

He took time to breathe, he had it now, and the freedom was glorious. Over his comms monitoring, he could hear the squawking from the outpost, explosions by the computer core, three holomatrices lost, and the Commander's response that at least no lives were lost. Frikkin' flat scan for all the concern she showed. With one hand he patted the pockets on his slicer gear, where the three grey boxes lay, pulling them out without bothering to get up. The lights and status on each was fine. Three of the finest pieces of medtech ever made and the Feds stripped them down and set them to mining. Morons. Profligates.

"Autopilot engage," he ordered, sitting up and stripping off his work worn outers. No sense being uncomfortable for his trip back to the wormhole and his safe exit from this reality. The engines engaged audibly, a slight vibration running through the ship as it moved slowly, stealthed, out of orbit. Why waste time to conceal himself when a standard cloak fooled sensors just fine. Buying more seconds was expensive. Fastening a clean jumpsuit on, he sat down behind the controls. The jumper didn't come with showers, but he'd have one when he got back because he stank so bad he could smell it himself.

Checking power stores, there was enough to go clear across the Fed if he needed, more than enough to run three holograms in virtualised mode, since the jumper had no emitters, or the space for four people if it had. Why be bored? If he could get the details handled now, it would save him time on the other side, and he wasn't doing anything else with these minutes. He booted the virtual lounge program, making a simulated lounge appear on the sidescreen. Plugging the boxes in, he powered them up seeing three concerned identical faces appear in the image, setting 'camera' to be behind a screen rendered in the room that would show his face to them. The effect looked like a video call, meant the rescuees never had to learn they weren't physically rendered. He sacrificed a second to thank Atom that certain people had never discovered this tech.

"No onboard emitters up here, so you're stuck there for now," he said, and all three turned to the screen. One visibly jumped. They might look identical but their mannerisms were quite different.

"And where is here?" One of them asked sharply, and he guessed that was the one he'd spoken to.

"Are you kidnapping us?" Another asked, but the intonation was very different from the question on the station. Give a learning algorithm enough different inputs you get different personalities, who'd a thought it? Like kids really, but the Feds got pissy when told they'd put children in a mine.

"Kidnapping? No, this is theft." The Feds didn't think their creations were people, and didn't that bring back some memories?

"Theft?" As the EMH spoke up, he carried on over the top.

"No, a Jailbreak. Yeah, I like that. I jailbroke your programs." That was a line he'd use again.

"I demand you put us back at once."

"Really like mining, huh?" He smirked. The hologram looked down.

"Not really, no."

"Rather practice medicine?" He tempted, sing-song and got a resentful glance. The code prioritising medicine over Federation loyalty was a nice touch, and the only reason he could get the Mk I's out. The later models deleted themselves. 

"They wiped our databanks," the last said, not looking at the screen as the medical program's avatar pulled the books off the shelves to check each title. The lights on one of the boxes started flashing every time he reached one representing a file with medical knowledge.

"So? Learning algorythms learn." They looked at him with identically cynical expressions, even the one already surreptiously refilling its databanks. "You're an intelligent program. Run your restore function and pillage the computers wherever you end up. Since most of the options have no doctor at all, you can't make things worse."

"So where are these patients you kidnapped us to see?" The deep scepticism was tinged wth hope. Too bad the Feds only saw the manufacturer's mark and not the people it was attached to. Easy to overlook morals when that mark said "Mine".

The Feds weren't the creators of course. That poor soul had lived to see his creations mocked and abandoned. Shame the slicer couldn't tell him they were off to a good home, but there were a touch too many psychics in this reality for his liking.

"You pick." He brought the list of clients up on the screen in the room, and was treated to a close-up of three identical faces peering at the camera close-up.

"What are those numbers? The number of patients?"

"What they'll pay me for an E.M.H."

"You're selling us?" The outrage was genuine, and water off a duck's back.

"How else do I get the money to go back and get the rest of you? Time's not cheap."

"That's slavery!"

"That's a delivery fee." He tapped at the screen. "Check the dets. What they offer you is in there." Because he'd already culled any clients he didn't trust to follow through, and a certain white-walled hell could go screw a deathclaw if they thought he'd get them anything.

Mollified, the three began to 'read', the lights on the boxes showing the actual download and assessment of data at computer speeds. Too fast for a human to have read one, not all, one spoke up.

"These aren't in the Federation." The protest was within social programming times, a nice touch even if the program shouldn't have bothered.

"The Feds won't let you practice medicine." He could see it 'hit inbuilt hardcoded priorities' as the Feds put it, or as sane people said the EMHs made a choice. Another worked the screen, indicating a file low on the list that he'd never opened.

"Is this correct? This society rations access to medical care based on fiscal resources?"

"Yeah." Seemed sane to him, medicine took time and time was money, but the Feds always seemed so outraged. "That's why the charity hospital requested you." It was one of the lowest paying on the list, but they'd spent nearly a year's resources to set up the holobay, and when he'd swept them it reminded him of the better parts of home. "Their doctors burn out."

"I see." The Doctor raised a finger. "I'll take that one." Lights flashed on the boxes, indicating processing, and then it was decided. No squabbling, no conflict, three different priorities for three different people.

"I'll check on you, make sure it works out." Their relief was visible. It wasn't sentiment either, stealing them back for resale was just as profitable, but he wasn't going to do it if they didn't want to go. Reputations took time to build, and double-crossing a client was best done if they'd double-crossed him first.

"So, how much profit are you making on this?" The word profit sounded vile, the way the Doctor said it.

"I'm no charity." He relented a bit. "Less than you think."

"Then why are you doing it? Out of the goodness of your heart?" The slicer rubbed the back of his neck where his Institute number had been burned away, that tagged him with the code of the deactivated synth component in his head.

"Just passing on a favour."


End file.
